SOUNDS AROUND TOWN: Peter Wolf is still belting out blues (and rock and more) and coloring canvases

Thursday

Oct 5, 2017 at 2:34 AMOct 9, 2017 at 5:15 PM

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Long before Peter Wolf embarked on a solo career, singing with his current band the Midnight Travelers; well before he gyrated and growled and spouted out epic blasts of seemingly off-the-cuff rhymes – while showing off his prowess for rock and blues – as the front man for the J. Geils Band; before he was singing soul numbers with Boston Tea Party regulars the Hallucinations, Wolf was a painter.

Oh, there was music in his life from a very young age. His dad was a vaudeville musician. His older sister was a dancer on Alan Freed’s TV show “The Big Beat.” And before he ever thought of singing, there were trials and tribulations on all sorts of instruments.

“They gave me piano lessons,” said the Bronx-born, Boston-based Wolf, who performs with the Midnight Travelers at the Somerville Theatre on Oct. 19. “But after the second lesson, the piano teacher said to my mother, ‘Don’t do it, it’s gonna be too cruel, let him be.’ From there I tried violin, but then they put me on the snare drum in the school orchestra. Then they put me on cymbals. I ended up on the triangle. At that point, even though I didn’t quite know what it was, I had serious dyslexia, so learning music was difficult for me. The actual aspect of playing music seemed very difficult to me as a child, and I thought it would be a lot easier to understand painting. I think that’s what drew me to painting.”

Painting became Wolf’s passion, and the route that led to his career in music was circuitous.

“I dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York,” he said. “But as my friends went on to college, I was a very committed painter. So I followed them to different schools, pretending I was a student in the art department. I went from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Chicago, and down toward Pennsylvania. I was even at Brandeis. But one time, Leon Botstein, who was a friend at University of Chicago and is now president of Bard College, and I were driving to Boston to visit some friends, and he mentioned the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. I dropped off some paintings there, they accepted me, I ended up getting a scholarship, I moved to Boston, and I’ve been here ever since. It ended my nomad gypsy existence and my trying to impersonate myself as an art student from the higher places of learning throughout the country.”

The story of how Wolf first got up to sing in front of people has had many versions over the years. Here’s his.

“I was living in Mission Hill in a cold-water flat. I went to a loft party and there was a bunch of musicians who were going to art school there. They were playing a song, G.L. Crockett’s ‘There’s a Man Down There,’ and they didn’t know the words. But it was a record I had just bought, so I did know the words. I had a little bit of Cucamonga Wine in me, so I got up and started singing, and it was kind of an epiphany moment. It just stayed with me, and the next day I remember calling up the guys and saying, ‘Are you rehearsing again? Can I come by?’ It took me a while to finally get into the band, but they later became the Hallucinations.”

The Hallucinations morphed into the Geils Band, and when that band dissolved, Wolf went solo, putting out a series of albums, starting with “Lights Out” in 1984. His most recent, featuring the Midnight Travelers – Duke Levine and Kevin Barry on guitars, Tom Arey on drums, Tom West on keyboards, and Marty Ballou on bass – was last year’s “A Cure for Loneliness.”

Though Wolf had been pretty laid back while relating these stories, his excitement level increased noticeably when he was asked about the Somerville Theatre show.

“Being in this town so long, and playing everything from different clubs to the Combat Zone to the original Boston Tea Party and the second Tea Party, the old Boston Garden and the new Boston Garden, and now we’re coming back to Somerville, I know this area is such a great spot for music,” he said. “It’s hometown, and we haven’t done a hometown solo show in quite a while. The Somerville Theatre is a great room and it’s acoustically good. What we’ll do is explore all the different solo works, and add some of my favorite Geils songs, and some other songs. We’ve got a pretty interesting collection of material.”

But is he still finding time to paint?

“Yes, I paint quite a lot,” he said. “And I search for out of print art books. That’s what keeps me going in the wee hours.”

Peter Wolf and the Midnight Travelers play the Somerville Theatre on Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and info: 1-800-745-3000.